Some of us expect the greatest education reform benefit that No Child Left Behind is likely to yield to be the onrushing flood of information about school, district, and state performance. Even if NCLB's various top-down interventions don't work as intended, parents, voters, and taxpayers across the land will be empowered by these "report cards" of various sorts to press for action at the building, local or state levels. Bravo. With rare exceptions (e.g. defense, social security), most of a democracy's worthwhile decision-making occurs close to home.
But information is essential, and its handmaiden is transparency: the information's ability to be accessed by people who might use it to do something to improve their schools. Transparency, however, often is a policy that must be imposed from above, for the simple reason that the custodians of any given unit, mindful of the power that information confers on their critics, are apt to be as secretive as possible and to want to put their own spin on whatever information comes out. (How well I remember the tussles of the 1980's over whether NAEP results would be made available for individual states. For the longest time, most state "chiefs" were mightily opposed. It took a federal law.)
That's why it was so disappointing to learn that the Pennsylvania Department of Education is refusing to release district-by-district data on how many middle-school teachers failed (and passed) the state's (federally mandated) certification exams in core academic subjects.
Philadelphia released its own bleak results: half the teachers failed (including two-thirds of middle school math instructors). But superintendent Paul Vallas, no wimp he, defended both the test and the publication of results. "Look," he said, "we're holding the kids to higher standards. We need to hold our teachers to higher standards, too."
He also did something about it. He rustled up a mixture of federal and private (Wachovia Bank) dollars to start a new "academy" where teachers can brush up on their content knowledge. Exactly right.
Then the media asked the state education department for the results from Pennsylvania's other 500 school districts. And were turned down cold. The agency gave out statewide data: not counting Philadelphia, 23.7 percent of the test-taking middle-school teachers flunked the subject-matter tests. But the department stonewalled requests for these results to be broken out by district. Superintendent Vicki Phillips came up with half a dozen reasons, mostly along the lines of, it's up to each local district to release (or ask the state to release) its data, and the teachers themselves have two more years before they're required by NCLB to be "highly qualified." Yadda yadda yadda.
I have no knowledge of what may be occurring within Ms. Phillips's (very smart) mind, but on its face the Pennsylvania Department of Education is engaging in classic bureaucratic behavior: masking unwelcome results lest someone be held accountable for them, keeping the citizenry in the dark lest it upset the establishment, and denying the very transparency that NCLB is meant to foster. Shame on them.
"Teachers come up short in testing," by Susan Snyder and Dale Mezzacappa, Philadelphia Inquirer, March 23, 2004 (registration required)
"Academy to help boost teachers' knowledge," by Susan Snyder, Philadelphia Inquirer, April 1, 2004 (registration required)
"Phila. middle school teachers fail 'highly qualified' tests," by Bess Keller, Education Week, April 7, 2004
